How To Use Litmus Builder To Automate Your Email Development Workflow: Webinar Recording

When coding and designing emails, you’re often stuck with mundane, repetitive tasks: writing inline CSS, adding UTM codes, sending test emails, and copying and pasting to your ESP. This manual process can be frustrating and challenging for even the most advanced email geeks.

While there’s a way to automate all those mundane tasks using task runners, it can be challenging to set up and maintain them.

Don’t worry: we hosted a webinar that covered how to cut your email development time in half with Litmus Builder. Discover how to start automating your workflow.

We didn’t have time to get to all of the questions during the webinar, but we’ve answered them here on our blog. Have any additional questions? Leave them in the comments, we’d love to answer them for you.

Does Tracking Manager in Litmus support tracking multiple links?

Tracking Manager automatically detects all the existing links in an email and allows you to select which links you’d like to apply your tracking code. At this point in time, Tracking Manager only supports using one tracking code, but you can track multiple links with that code.

Links are automatically grouped by root domain. For example, all links that begin with litmus.com will be grouped together under litmus.com. To select individual links or root domain groups to track, check them, or you can select or deselect all links at once. If you add links at any point in the Builder document, you can go back into Tracking Manager to determine if it will add the tracking code or not (all links get the tracking code added by default when added).

How can you manage version control in Builder?

The Timeline feature in Builder gives you complete version control access to your Builder documents. Every time you save a Builder document, it’s stored in Timeline. From there, you can see which user in your account made the save and at what time. Click on any version to preview that version of the email and see the code, or restore any previous versions of the email.

What is the difference between Partials and Snippets?

Partials are global and dynamic across emails whereas Snippets live in an individual email.
Snippets are customizable for an individual email whereas Partials are not.

Partials work well for reusable blocks of code across multiple emails, such as headers, footers, reset CSS, and commonly used call-to-actions. You can use Partials for any modular components where the content is static across multiple emails and no individual customization is needed. Partials live globally and any change made to a Partial will apply to every single email where that Partial is referenced. It makes managing and maintaining your emails much easier.

Snippets, on the other hand, allow you to customize your individual emails easily by outputting commonly used HTML or CSS components. Snippets are not global or dynamic like Partials and are only outputted in an individual email where they are used. For example, let’s say you have a brand-specific CTA button that uses the exact same code you would use for your emails. Use Snippets to quickly generate the HTML or CSS and edit the content quickly in that individual email. Snippets help reduce redundancy for common elements you generate in individual emails.

Do you recommend sending out an email campaign with images hosted in Builder?

We recommend against using images hosted in Builder for your email campaigns. It is not designed or built to accommodate email campaign images at scale.

Builder uses Amazon s3 as a hosting service for images which is reliable, but the intent of Builder is to be a testing sandbox environment. It’s best to host your images in your ESP instead, and reference your images there for more reliability.

Are there any free templates available in Builder? Are they responsive?

Yes! You can visit the Templates section in Builder for open-source responsive templates as a starting point for your emails. We also have over 25 free responsive templates over in the Litmus Community. All of these templates are pre-tested in Litmus and have our official stamp of approval.

Automate Your Email Development With Litmus Builder

From Partials to CSS Inlining to Tracking Manager, you can automate the mundane aspects of email development and focus on making email better.

Builder tools + resources

Tracking Manager: With tracking manager in Litmus Builder, you can say goodbye to the hassle of copying your tracking code, endlessly scrolling or searching for every single link the email, and pasting the tracking code to each link. You can even customize your UTM codes to suit your tracking preferences.

Partials: Available in Litmus Builder, Partials allow you to create global, dynamic, reusable blocks of code for your emails. Partials are completely dynamic, so editing and saving a Partial updates it across every email where that Partial is used.

Code Analysis: When building or editing an email or template in Litmus Builder, you can toggle on Code Analysis in the detailed view of an individual email client. Any unsupported HTML or CSS properties in that specific email client will be highlighted, saving you countless hours of troubleshooting.

Snippets: Snippets are modules of reusable code. They’re ideal for elements that are commonly used across email designs, like doctype, bulletproof buttons, and links. Rather than having to re-write the code each time one of these elements is used, you can use a snippet. Using snippets automates your coding and drastically speeds up development time.

Emmet: Emmet is a free add-on for a variety of text editors—including Litmus Builder—that allows you to type shortcuts that are then expanded into full pieces of code. By using Emmet, you can type less, saving both keystrokes and time when building a campaign. Also, relying on Emmet’s autocompletion means fewer typos and missing tags, leading to more robust emails.

Public Trello Roadmap: This is our editor. We hope you’ll join us in building the perfect email editor and revolutionizing the email industry. In order to do so, feel free to vote and comment on feature requests in the Builder Roadmap.

Litmus Builder How To Guide: Check out our detailed guide that covers everything from creating a project to downloading an email to 1-click testing.

Start Automating Your Workflow

With a variety of resources like Partials, Snippets, CSS Inlining, and more, you can cut your development time in half. The real question is: what will you do with all of that extra time?